New positive cases shown with * current hospital and ventilator usage each day since March.

Missouri has seen a fall in hospital usage as the cases have stayed relatively steady. Now that cases are rising, it will be interesting to see if hospitalizations also go up.

This Week's Data

This chart shows the overall positivity rate in the State of Missouri (positive tests / total tests reported).

Since reporting of tests varies based on backlog, I’m showing the reported testing on a 7-day moving average.

Ballpark estimate based on confirmed cases only

Assume that all positive cases were tested and received results on first day of infection and are contagious for 14 days

KC Metro defined as: Kansas City, Jackson County, Clay County, Platte County, Cass County, Johnson County (KS), and Wyandotte County (KS)

7-day moving average, positive tests only. Counties have only recently started to report the number of tests. NYT data does not include testing for now.

Johnson (KS) has risen significantly while Kansas City and Wyandotte remain high

Personal preference, but KC is so widespread that I wish the reporting was all done on the county level so we could pin-point issues. Living in Platte County, it appears that the cases are low, but the population outside of Kansas City is also very low. PCHD reports both KC and Platte cases on their site and there are usually just as many KC/Platte cases as there are unincorporated Platte.

Top counties in Missouri for positive tests, 7-day moving average.

McDonald County sticks out the most here. Huge swing in positive tests starting 6/20-6/21.

Joplin is now reporting COVID cases in the city as of 6/25. Must be pulling out for greater visibility. Reviewing the cases for Jasper/Newton Counties and it appears that the Joplin cases were not taken out of the county cases so I’ll be filtering Joplin out of the results for now while reviewing for the future.

Driving data by metro county (plus KC) indexed to 100 beginning January 13, 2020

This dataset is freely available from Apple as a CSV and requires minimal cleaning to work with (Apple is the best). Data can be downloaded HERE but you can also access my cleaned data for KC Metro Driving (metro_driving.xlsx) and all forms of transportation for the metro (apple_mobility_metro.xlsx) in the output folder of the repo HERE

I find the depth and length of Platte County’s lack of mobility particularly interesting. Platte is one of the richest counties in MO (per capita), which seems to make sense. A lot of jobs that people hold in Platte County are easily transferred to the home office.

Johnson and Clay Counties also saw similarly large decreases in mobility early on but appear to risen earlier than Platte. Johnson, Platte and Clay all had stay at home orders that lifted on 5/3

Movement is relative to median activity from January 1st to February 6th

Travel to workplaces and retail stores dropped with the stay at home orders and has slowly risen

As of the end of June, travel to retail locations is similar to retail shops is roughly the same as January this year BUT this is not a good thing. We’re in peak retail shopping season so it would be much higher in a normal year.